Unit 2 Notes

Motivation
Organizational behavior is a field of study in business that has grown out of the traditional social sciences. Organizational behavior is the study of human behavior, attitudes, and performance in organizations. It is interdisciplinary, drawing concepts from the social and clinical psychology, sociology, cultural anthropology and organizational psychology. It is a field of study that focuses on observable behaviors and internal mental states. Studying organizational behavior will help you attain the competencies needed to be an effective employee, team leader, and/or manager. The knowledge and skills you gain should help you diagnose, understand, and explain what is happening around you in your job.

Work Motivation
Motivation is the set of forces that cause people to choose certain behaviors from among the many alternatives open to them. The success of every organization depends on the ability of managers to provide a motivating environment for its employees. Motivated employees are more productive, happier, and stay with the organization longer. Work motivation is the direction, intensity, and persistence of work-related behaviors desired by the organization or its representatives. This emphasizes the determinants and processes that underlie behavior. In his 1998 article "Management's New Paradigms," Peter F. Drucker argues against the traditional view that the essential managerial task is to tell workers what to do. Thus managers today must direct people and lead workers instead of managing them.

Theories of Motivation
Motivation theorists assume that motivation is involved in the performance of all learned responses; that is, a learned behavior will not occur unless it is energized. The most common theories of motivation in organizational behavior include Abraham Maslow’s Need Hierarchy Theory, Douglas McGregor's Theory X and Theory Y, Frederick Herzberg’s motivation-hygiene theory, and the contributions of Elton Mayo that encouraged researchers to study human motivation and the managerial styles that lead to greater productivity.

Job Design
Job design is defined as determining the most efficient way to execute tasks. An employee's job is made up of a set of tasks grouped together under one job title. Thus, tasks represent the most basic building blocks of the relationship between employees and the organization, and are composed of the set of prescribed work activities a person normally performs during a typical work period. Job design can be traced back to views that emerged in the United Kingdom around the time of the Industrial Revolution. Some promoted the division of labor or the breaking down of complex jobs into simpler jobs as a way of enhancing performance. The added advantages of such job simplification include the requirement of less skilled and, hence, cheaper labor.

Goal Setting
Instead of giving people vague tasks, specific and pronounced objectives help in achieving them faster. The clarity is high, so goal orientation also avoids any misunderstandings in the work of the employees. The premise of goal setting theory in organizational behavior is that specifying, setting, and assigning difficult goals for employees, when accepted or generated by the employees, usually leads to improved and increased performance. Thus, the goal setting theory states that when the goals to be achieved are set at a higher standard, then in that case employees are motivated to perform better and put in maximum effort. It revolves around the concept of "Self-efficacy;" in other words, an individual’s belief that he or she is capable of performing a difficult task. Thus, goals motivate by focusing employees' attention, increasing their effort, and increasing their diligence. Nonetheless, there are drawbacks of the goal-setting approach. Theory such as goal setting will be adversely affected if the employees' tasks become less enjoyable as a result of unattainable and rigid goals. This will retard and impede the organization’s progress.

Performance Appraisal
One of the most controversial and powerful tools at a manager's disposal is the performance appraisal. It can be used as a tool of negative power or one of positive powerful feedback. Traditional performance appraisals are hierarchical. The most effective performance appraisals do not just occur annually; informal versions occur continuously via casual feedback. Ideally, performance appraisal allows management to specify what employees must do, and combines feedback and goal setting.